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  • svgAug 20, 2019News

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    Information has come out about Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. This reboot is to be the first Bokujo Monogatari game for Nintendo Switch. (It is the official remake of Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town.) Please note that None of this has been revealed to us by Marvelous themselves. Rather, we gathered this info from Reddit, from u/arehi_wnl. The information comes from two separate interviews with Mr. Nakano.

    More remakes in the future?

    ChinaJoy is a Chinese gaming convention that you could think of as their equivalent of E3. Some Chinese journalists interviewed Mr. Nakano, of the development team. They spoke of the upcoming Bokujou Monogatari game, set for release in Japan on October 11th. Some big news was revealed in this interview, including the fact that Marvelous will consider remaking more Bokumono games if this remake is successful.

    New game still in development!

    It was also revealed that a NEW Bokujou Monogatari game is still in the works. Those of us who have been pining for a brand new farming adventure can rest easy! The brand new Story of Seasons game we’ve been hoping for is indeed already in development.

    And if that weren’t enough…

    We even got a sneak peek at the final bachelor! Up until now, we only had the silhouettes of two brand new characters to go by, but a screenshot of the male candidate has surfaced. His name, it seems, is Brandon. He will live in Gotz’s house and may be the his apprentice. (From the picture we think he might actually be a sculptor, but the reddit post suggests that he is an apprentice. Maybe he is both an apprentice carpenter AND a sculptor?)

    Many more juicy tidbits!

    Between the two interviews, we got quite a lot of information. Here are some highlights:

    • The “Best Friends” system used in DS Cute for special characters is being brought back for SoS: FoMT, but in a bigger way. You will be able to choose to make a life-long best-friends bond with any character who is the same gender as your character.
    • It is not a straight remake of Friends of Mineral Town. SoS: FoMT is bringing together a few aspects of Back to Nature, DS Cute, My Little Shop, and newer games like Trio of Towns.
    • Some of Back to Nature’s events and festivals will be in SoS: FoMT
    • You will be able to choose ‘seedling’ or ‘veteran’ mode, as you could in Story of Seasons and Trio of Towns.
    • There will be no online connectivity.
    • Mines will have pitfalls instead of staircases.
    • There will be character customization.
    • Making money will be easier.
    • Animals from Harvest Moon: My Little Shop, with specialty products, like the chocolate chicken, chocolate cow and strawberry cow, will be in SoS: FoMT.
    • Some of the additional houses will have lightened requirements to unlock.
    • Rare crops will be just as rare as in the original.
    • Your inventory will have a larger capacity.
    • SoS: FoMT may have DLC (it’s under consideration)
    • There will be no motion controls
    Mining in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town

    As far as we know, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town will be exclusive to Nintendo Switch. If this game is of interest to you, check out our initial coverage!

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  • svgAug 8, 2019News

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    Last Week Marvelous revealed the redesigns of four key characters in their reboot of Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. The game is not due for Japanese release until October 17th, but they have unexpectedly revealed another two new characters in this short amount of time! This time we have Ann and Kai. Both are ‘candidate’ characters who can be romanced and married by the main character.

    According to the Marvelous, Ann is a chipper girl who works at her father’s inn. She is a foodie and a skilled housekeeper. Kai is a friendly traveling merchant with a relaxed nature. He is from the city and only in town during summer.

    Now that we have seen Ann and Kai, there are only two marriage-candidate characters left to be revealed. The two mysterious new characters that we got a glimpse of in Famitsu. Who could they be? Are they visiting characters from other Bokujou Monogatari games, or are they completely new?

    Silhouettes of two unknown new characters from Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town.
    Unknown characters who will appear in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town

    In addition to revealing Ann and Kai, Marvelous has also shown us how Ann’s father, Doug, will look. Duke and Manna have also gotten their debuts. What do you think of these reboots?

    Also, please note that because this will be a new localization, names are not final until XSEED confirms them. We are using the names these characters were known by in the original release. These images and more have also been added to the game’s recently updated official site.

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  • svgAug 5, 2019News

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    What is Rune Factory? Here is everything you need to know!

    The first Rune Factory game came out in Japan in 2006.  When localized in North America in 2007, it was called Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon.  If you haven’t played any Rune Factory games, you may wonder what ‘a fantasy Harvest Moon’ entails.

    Those of us who are already fans of Rune Factory know the answer to these questions. However, the niche series came to the attention of a much larger group of people when it was seen in the February 2019 Nintendo Direct.  People who had never even heard of it before were then asking “Rune Factory?  What’s that?” 

    That question has even been asked by fans of the Bokujou Monogatari series (Initially localized as Harvest Moon in English but renamed to Story of Seasons when the localization team changed from Natsume to XSeed.)  What does it mean that it is a ‘fantasy Harvest Moon’?  Is it the same game, except in a fantasy setting?  Today, we’re here to answer that question.

    Is it the same as Harvest Moon?

    Rune Factory started as a spin-off and does have many of the same elements as Bokujou Monogatari (often abbreviated as Bokumono).  It too is a life simulation game where you run a farm, and can build relationships with townfolk and even get married and have a child.  But being in a fantasy world with magic and monsters is not the only difference between the two.  Because Rune Factory has magic and monsters, and because you play a set character rather than creating your own, the gameplay is actually quite different.

    farming in RF4 - 3DS
    Farming in Rune Factory 4 on 3DS
    farming in rune factory 4 special
    Farming in Rune Factory 4 Special on Switch

    In Rune Factory, you don’t create your own avatar character. Rather, you play a set character…the protagonist of the story.  In the first Rune Factory, you played as Raguna.  Each game has its own protagonist, and though you can choose to change their name at the beginning, you can’t change who they are. 

    Rune Factory 4 on 3DS marks the first time in the series that you had an option between a male or a female protagonist on start-up, but they, too, are set characters, with the default name of the male version of the main character being Lest and the default name of the female version being Frey.

    Rune Factory 4’s Lest and Frey

    Being unable to create your own character is because, unlike Bokumono…where the idea is some variation of coming to own a farm and making it a success, sometimes revitalizing the whole town in the process… Rune Factory is based on a larger plot. 

    You can do more than farm

    Farming isn’t the only thing you’re there to do.  To set right anything that has gone wrong in the world, you must also fight monsters, navigate dungeons and win boss battles.

    To do this, you’ll need a broader range of skills than you do for farming alone.  You will also need to hone not just your combat skill in your chosen weapon styles (you can change your weapon style at any time), but also your blacksmithing, cooking and magical abilities, as well as many more. For the most part you make use of your own weapons, armour, accessories, health potions, and so on.  You start at level 1 in each skill, but can level up to 99 in all of them. 

    The latest game, Rune Factory 4, has over 30 individual skills.  Raising them not only makes you better at that skill, it will also provide benefits to your base stats, such as making you physically or magically stronger, tougher, or more enduring.  As you raise your skills, you will find yourself able to make better weapons (and food and armour, etc) out of better ingredients dropped from higher-level monsters and crops.

    You can tame monsters

    You can also tame the monsters you meet by petting and feeding them. Once tamed, you can keep them as companions, training them to fight at your side.  Each monster has its own skill set, and you can add them to your party in a similar way to how you can add your fellow villagers to your party.  (If you have a spouse and a child, you can even add both of them to your party and go out and fight as a family!) Some will do physical or elemental damage to your enemies, some from close range and others from a distance. 

    You can even tame boss monsters, like huge dragons. Some can be harvested for great ingredients every day, like milk, eggs, and honey. You can also reap crafting ingredients like fur and fangs.  Keeping a variety of monsters and taking good care of them to raise their affection for you can be a huge help in winning battles as well as in crafting. You can even enter your monster friends into some festivals.

    fighting monsters in rune factory 4 3DS
    Fighting monsters in Rune Factory 4 on 3DS
    Fighting monsters in RF4S on Switch

    But you do still farm!

    Like Bokumono, you do also farm (and have some magical crops in the mix!) and cook and socialize, and get married, too, if you want to. If you want to make a name for yourself as a farmer, you can! But you can also concentrate more on being a smith or a fighter. It’s your choice what to excel in. The pacing of a Rune Factory game is like Bokumono in that you’re in charge of how fast you progress. You decide what you want to spend your time on.  You will need to be able to fight efficiently, but there are many ways to win battles. Maybe you’re a close-up fighter, or a distance fighter , or even a magic user. Or maybe you’d rather have the strongest companions, who can do most of the damage for you.

    Do you need to start with the first Rune Factory game?

    Nope!  Rune Factory games are not directly connected.  They all take place in the same ‘world’, but not in the same region, and most involve completely different casts of characters.  You should feel free to start with Rune Factory 4 Special, even if you’ve never played any of the previous games in the series.

    Is “RF4S” just a Switch port of RF4 on 3DS?

    It isn’t a straight port.  It’s a remaster with some added content. The graphics have been improved so that they will look great on your television. RF4S is listed for release in North America sometime in 2019 (‘this winter’ for Europe) and is already out in Japan. Several Japanese-speaking spud-sympathizers have been asked about their experience playing RF4S and say they’re surprised just how good the game looks on the television screen.

    A ‘Honeymoon Mode’ has also been added to the game, where you will be able to experience new scenes with marriage candidates. So even players who have completed RF4 in the past will have some new content to look forward to in RF4S!

    In Conclusion…

    We at myPotatoGames are a little envious of those of you who haven’t played Rune Factory 4, yet.  It would be wonderful to be able to experience all the amazing content of RF4 (with the additional content and improved graphics of RF4S) for the first time again.  All of the potatoes in this patch are eagerly awaiting the upcoming release of Rune Factory 4 Special so that we can dive back into a favourite game yet again.

    And some of us can’t even speak coherently about how excited we are that Rune Factory 5 (the game that officially brings the abandoned series back to life under the hand of the original creator!) is set for Japanese release in 2020.  Can it possibly live up to RF4, when that is a game that many of the series’ fans feel is not just the best the series has ever seen, but is even a contender for their favourite game of all time?

    With 7 years of waiting under our belts so far, we sure want to find out! We want to so badly that we even had to compile a lists of games we can fill our time with in the meantime.

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  • svgJun 1, 2019Feature

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    With new titles such as Doraemon: Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon: Mad Dash releasing soon, we here at myPotatoGames thought it was a perfect opportunity to look back at the Bokujō Monogatari series. Below you’ll find a list of a few defining games of Harvest Moon, developed by Marvelous. Moreover, the reason for why we now technically have two separate Harvest Moon franchises.

    To summarize, the North American publishers responsible for the localization of the Bokujō Monogatari series change from Natsume to Marvelous’ own sister company Xseed Games in 2012. Therefore, we have Natsume continuing to create Harvest Moon branded games and Marvelous re-branding to Story of Seasons for their new line of farming simulation games. The PAL (European) distribution was handled by Rising Star Games and now Nintendo. Let us take a closer look at when this all began with the Westernization of this series.

    Japan: Marvelous – Creators of Bokujō Monogatari

    Harvest Moon was created in 1996 by Yasuhiro Wada and produced by Victor Interactive Software (acquired by Marvelous in 2003) and was known as Bokujō Monogatari in Japan. During this time, and until 2013, Natsume oversaw the English translation and publishing of the series, thus Harvest Moon.

    The Last Harvest Moon Game -Before the Split

    Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning was the last title in the Bokujō Monogatari series to be released under the “Harvest Moon” name with the developers involvement (Marvelous). The game was released on the 3DS in North America in 2012.

    North America: Natsume – Publishers (2013-present)

    In 2012, Marvelous discontinued licensing the series to Natsume. Natsume then began their own series of Harvest Moon games in North America and Europe beginning with the release of Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley in 2014. This is due to Natsume owning the rights to the brand and title of Harvest Moon. Therefore, the games below were not created by Marvelous but rather Tabot Inc. Light of Hope is their latest installment of their main series, released worldwide in 2017.

    North America: Xseed Games (Marvelous subsidiary) – Publishers

    In 2014, Marvelous Inc. announced that the latest installment in the series would be localized by their American publishing brand Xseed Games under the new series title Story of Seasons. The game Story of Seasons was subsequently released in North America in 2015 and the second game of that series, Trio of Towns, released in 2017.

    We’re very excited to play as many farming games as possible and glad that this genre is on the rise. If you’re interested in Yasuhiro Wada’s work (the original creator of Harvest Moon) then you should check out his most recent game, created by his own company Toybox, Little Dragons Café. You can also check out our latest news on Rune Factory; a spin-off series developed by Neverland Co. and published by Marvelous.

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